Western economies need to electrify and fast, but where are all the skilled workers going to come from to install the heat pumps, solar panels and batteries needed? This week on Zero, Akshat Rathi talks with Olivia Rudgard about the shortage of labor in electrification industries, and why some experts are calling it an ‘existential’ crisis. This is the second episode in Bottlenecks, a new series exploring the lesser known obstacles standing in the way of our electrified future.
Explore further:
- Read the Big Take: There Aren't Enough Engineers to Meet the World's Growing Hunger for Power
- Previous episode in Zero’s Bottleneckes series: How a Shortage of Transformers Threatens Electricity Supply
- Northvolt Hits End of Line After Failing to Reach Rescue Deal
Zero is a production of Bloomberg Green. Our producer is Oscar Boyd. Special thanks to: Jess Beck, Sommer Saadi, Mohsis Andam and Siobhan Wagner. Thoughts or suggestions? Email us at zeropod@bloomberg.net. For more coverage of climate change and solutions, visit https://www.bloomberg.com/green.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Zero. I am Aksha Drati This week, where
are all the people? Last year I spoke to Keith Anderson,
CEO of Scottish Barer for an episode of Zero, and
(00:23):
there was a throwaway line in that long conversation that
has stuck with me. It was about people.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
Right now, I'm looking to employ another thousand engineers. My
counterparts at SASE are looking to employ another thousand engineers,
and my counterparts on National Grid are looking to employ
another thousand engineers. We're all looking for about two and
a half thousand engineers that are not two and a
half thousand unemployed engineers in central Scotland. So if we
(00:49):
don't do anything differently, we'll just run around stealing staff
from each other.
Speaker 1 (00:55):
The people challenge for any growing industry is a known problem,
but the Heat's answer made me look deeper for why
that shortage of skilled workers for electrification industries is a
more severe challenge than most people think, and it was
not hard to find examples in almost every large economy
in the world except you guessed it, China. This week's
(01:18):
episode is going to explore the second story in the
Bottleneck series for Bloomberg Green, where we look at unusual
things that are holding back electrification and to help me
bring out the best of the reporting. I'm joined by
my London colleague, Olivia Rudgar. This will be the second
episode in the Bottleneck series. If you haven't listened to
the first one, please check out last week's episode on
(01:39):
the shortage of transformers and why we are running the
Bottleneck series in the first place. Welcome back to the show, Olivia,
Thank you so much. So you write about many things
for green By. One of your focus areas is greener
living and that means writing about things like heat pumps.
How did all of that bring you to the subject
(02:01):
of our chat today, which is a shortage of skilled workers.
Speaker 3 (02:05):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (02:05):
So I spent quite a lot of time thinking about
the heat pump market and how installations are going.
Speaker 3 (02:09):
And the short answer to that.
Speaker 4 (02:10):
Is not very quickly, especially in the UK, and the
reasons for that, and some of them with structural their
cost based, but a lot of it is because there's
just not a very mature industry for heat pump installers
in the UK. There are not enough people who know
how to do a really good heat pump install and
I thought it would be quite interesting to try and look
at that, and especially in the context of what's happening now,
which is you get big companies coming in to try
(02:32):
and be heat pump installers and where are they finding
the people to do that.
Speaker 1 (02:35):
We heard in the intro the CEO of Scottish Power
talk about a shortage of people working in the utilities.
So typically in a newsroom, when two reporters who are
working on two different things come across a trend that
seems to be affecting a big industry, it's time to
look more deeply. And that's what we've done with this
story with our colleague Jost Soul in New York. We
(02:58):
interview dozens of people for this and one of those
interviews really stuck out. Bathsudmeyer, who's the managing director at
Boston Consulting Group and head of its climate and sustainability practice,
said this thing. He said, the north Volt fiasco is
a classic example of a great idea in concept, but
it fails over the availability of labor. And for context,
(03:19):
Northwold is a Swedish company aiming to be Europe's first
battery giant. And I say aiming to be it's because well,
it filed for bankruptcy in March twenty twenty five. So Olivia,
what happened and why is a shortage of workers involved here?
Speaker 3 (03:36):
Yeah?
Speaker 4 (03:36):
So, I mean this is one of those stories where
I had to really rethink what I understood about what
happened with Northvale. They were for a while a big
European success story. This was sort of Europe's effort to
be a global power on the battery stage.
Speaker 3 (03:51):
They were on the verge of doing an IPO.
Speaker 4 (03:52):
They announced that they were going to do one of
twenty twenty three, and then it all fell apart.
Speaker 3 (03:56):
And I think what we found was, you know, they
just didn't have the.
Speaker 4 (03:59):
Pace people that knew how to run the really sophisticated
machinery that they were using for the manufacturing, and those
people tended to come from China and South Korea and
they just couldn't get them. And the domestic population in
Europe where they were operating just wasn't sufficient. They just
couldn't get the expertise and production sload to the extent
that they weren't making any money.
Speaker 3 (04:19):
And that was the issue.
Speaker 1 (04:21):
Yeah. I mean, the company raised thirteen billion dollars in total,
and if it had iPod when they were hoping to IPO,
which is in twenty twenty three, the valuation could have
been twenty billion dollars and so suddenly that company has
gone to well, not zero, because there will be something
that people can recover from it, but it doesn't exist
as a company that had all this ambition. It is
(04:43):
quite an extreme example of what a shortage of workers
can do. It can lead to a company failing. But
shortages of skilled workers in itself is not a new thing.
Often in booming industries there is just a difficulty of
finding people because sometimes the skills are just new and
you need to find the people with those skills or
(05:04):
train them. These days, automation can help sometimes do smooth
things over, but eventually you just need people for those jobs.
What we found in the electrification industries is that people
are particularly alarmed with this problem. Why is that.
Speaker 4 (05:20):
I think the alarm comes from, you know, some deadlines
that you have on that industry that you possibly don't
in other industries. Part of that is meeting climate goals.
You know, these are in some cases sort of technologies
that are scaling up really rapidly and in the last
few years in the West, so you know in Europe
and the US, there's been a sudden sort of influx
of investment or a sudden influx of interest, and that's
(05:42):
really rising quite recently, and you see that in the
heat pup market, and obviously that was the case with Norfall,
and that's kind of coupled with some more sort of
underlying demographic and historic trends that have made that increase
sort of difficult service. So, you know, there's very well
known to be an aging population worker age population is
not where I think most companies in any sector would.
Speaker 3 (06:03):
Like it to be for the availability of labor.
Speaker 4 (06:06):
And then coupled with that, you know, especially in the
UK where we sit now, there's a long history of
the industrialization. You know, the UK is an industrial power
and it certainly isn't anymore. So we've shared a lot
of the resource that we once had in that space.
Speaker 1 (06:18):
And in our reporting we found that shortage of skilled
workers is not quite a global problem. Places like India
and China, where there is a large population and where
they have seen electricity demand rise five or ten percent
per year, those are places that typically don't face a
shortage of workers. In the case of China, in fact,
we found that they just have many more than they
(06:41):
need to do their jobs. It's really a shortage of
workers in Western economies. Now, before we get to solutions,
let's try and understand what is the impact this can
have on companies. So, in the case of heat pumps,
business can slow down. In the case of Northworld, a
company can fail. What other impacts are there?
Speaker 4 (07:04):
Yeah, I mean, it obviously increases the cost. If there's
not enough labor, the cost of hiring goes up. You
have to pay your workers more.
Speaker 3 (07:11):
So. One example that Josh our colleague in the US,
came up with.
Speaker 4 (07:15):
He found and that Dominion Energy, which is a utility
in Virginia, asked regulators to increase bills for residential customers
by about ten dollars fifty per month over the next
two years, which is partly because of that high cost
of labor.
Speaker 3 (07:27):
So it's being passed on to the consumer as well.
Speaker 4 (07:30):
And you know, in the sector that I'm most familiar
with that out of all of these, which is the
heat pump sector, what we found was that for Octopus certainly,
which is one of the biggest players in this market,
the strangle on their ambitions to sort of dominate and
grow it's not, you know, a lack of consumer demand.
It's not a lack of components or sort of physical items,
it's that lack of labor. So, you know, we had
(07:51):
one executive tell us, it's not that we don't have
the technology or the hardware or solutions. It's just how
quickly we can physically get people brought into the business
and trained up. And the ultimate impact of that is
that they are limited in terms of the number of
heat pumps they can instore for people.
Speaker 1 (08:05):
So one idea to try and deal with the shortage
of people is of course to import them. Now, the
politics of immigration is complicated, but companies who want more
people want them quickly. Are they calling on governments to
make it easier to bring people from places like Indian
China where these skills are in abundance.
Speaker 4 (08:25):
Yeah, So it wasn't really something that came up in
our conversations when we talk to people that we didn't
have lots of companies saying, oh, yes, please, we would
like more liberal immigration laws, even when we were asking
them what would help you. I think it's interesting if
you look at the sort of current political climate, it's
quite difficult maybe for companies to explicitly ask for that,
and it's very sort of politically contentious. So, you know,
(08:45):
I talked to Julia Jlatt, who's the associate director at
the Migration Policy Institute, and she just said companies are
not talking about immigration policy. They are running away from
the topic. And I think that holds true across both
the US and Europe at the moment.
Speaker 1 (08:58):
And immigrants have met to this industry. One of those
reports from Julia's institute found that eight percent of renewable
energy workers in Spain are immigrants, twenty six percent in Australia,
So the numbers can be quite large depending on when
the world these industries are growing. Coming to the politics
(09:19):
of immigration, you and I sit in a country that
chose to Brexit, which means leave the EU as a
result of wanting to have fewer immigrants. Now we are
a few years on from when Brexit happened. How did
that play out for the UK?
Speaker 4 (09:34):
Yeah, so the picture with immigration and brexit's quite interesting
because you know, one of the things you did here
around the time that it was being campaigned for by
supporters of Brexit were actually, you know, this would open
the UK up to bring in more skilled immigrants. From
places outside the EU, so you know, India would have
been one of those places. And the fact of the
matter now is that not only has immigration gone up
(09:55):
quite significantly since then, so it hasn't come down in
the way that you know, some supporters would have wanted.
You don't here really hear many people making that argument
now that we should have lots more immigrants from India,
so that I think that's an interesting indication of where
that picture has gone. The kind of underlying context of
this is, like we said before, you know, the UK
is not an industrial power anymore. Less than ten percent
(10:16):
of the UK's economic output comes from manufacturing.
Speaker 3 (10:20):
There's been a big increase in immigration.
Speaker 4 (10:22):
In the last few years, which has been really politically controversial.
Paul after poll suggests it's something that people are really
concerned about, and that sort of political context is now
forcing the left leaning Labor Party to look at some
quite restrictive immigration policies and just recently actually, so I
think that we're in a situation now where it's I
(10:42):
can see why it's difficult for companies to say things
that would be pro more migration.
Speaker 1 (10:47):
Yeah, I mean, the nuance of Brexit perhaps is lost
on people outside because from Brexit there was actually a
shortage of workers in the UK, and that caused the
Conservative Party, which was eating exit, to actually loosen the
criteria for legal migration, and which is what led to
(11:07):
a huge number of people coming in trying to solve
the problems that the country had. And now there's a
backlash where even the left leaning party, which is typically
thought of as being more pro immigration, has had to
take stances that are seemingly like of f our right party.
And so if immigration may not be a viable solution
in the short term, there is one thing that companies
(11:29):
could be doing, which is approaching people from other sectors.
Is that happening, Yeah.
Speaker 4 (11:35):
I mean that was one of the things that I
think was most interesting in this reporting, the similarities actually
between some of the processes in these really technical sectors
and some of the more established traditional areas of manufacturing.
So you know, for example, we talked to uk Bic,
which is a facility that helps battery companies develop and
(11:55):
industrialize their processes, and they've hired people quite a few
people from say industries like baking, so people who are
making pastry are now making batteries, and there's a lot
of crossover there, so you know, that's something that they've
they've had to think outside the box and be a
little bit innovative.
Speaker 1 (12:10):
When I heard that, I was actually not surprised. As
a chemical engineer, I kind of know this. In batteries,
you actually have stuff that is quite dough like, quite
flower like, and so you know, machines handle dough and
flower and so machines can handle battery chemicals. But yes,
it is something that people find surprising, which is that
(12:31):
these transferable skills from other industries that could be applied
to what you know, would have been seen as a
high tech manufacturing versus croissot making.
Speaker 4 (12:40):
Yeah, and I you know, I think even with the
UK PIC people that we spoke to, there is still
a learning process. So it takes, you know, many months
to get people up to the level where they can
be let loose, I suppose on the factory floor. And
if you think about that's where people already have a
level of comfort and understanding of what it's like to
be an industrial facility. Training somebody from scratch is a
(13:01):
whole different ballgame. So you know, we also talk to
a professor at Newcastle University who's really involved in the
process of staffing some of these battery facilities that are
coming to the UK that you know, within the next
few years, really really tight deadlines, you know. And he
was making the point that in southwest of England, which
is one area where these one of these facilities are
supposed to be, it's a very agricultural area, you know,
that's what the history is, that's what the people's background
(13:24):
and their understanding and their maybe their job experiences, and
going from that to working in a battery facility is
a much bigger jump.
Speaker 1 (13:31):
And so training came up as one of those things
which companies deploy to try and deal with these solutions.
What does this training look like on the ground.
Speaker 4 (13:41):
Yeah, so when we talk about training, it can mean
a whole range of different things. You can be starting
with people who have a little bit of experience in
an industry or none at all, and obviously that then
changes the level of teaching you have to do. But
you know, you can take this right back to the
school level. So you know, it's arguable that there's potentially
not enough focus on those technical skills that are being
taught in schools. So, for example, the French power company
(14:01):
enodis is doing technology classes in high schools and also
in universities, and then they kind of offer internships off
the back of that, so they know that those people
who've done those training programs have a really good basis
in the skills that they need. And then you know,
one of the other things that we found was there's
quite a lot of career changing in this industry, so
people coming into it a lot later on, maybe with
(14:23):
soft skills or other skills that are then helpful and
relevant to them in that more technical career, but not
potentially with the technical background, which is what they then need.
Speaker 3 (14:30):
To be taught.
Speaker 1 (14:31):
And to try and just get a sense of what
this training looks like, Octopus Energy opened their doors to us.
We got to go to Sheffield and North of England
and actually look at what a training center looks like.
What does training on a day look like for people
who are coming into this industry. From the day we
(14:51):
spent in Sheffield, what did you find surprising?
Speaker 4 (14:54):
Well, it was really interesting to be sort of allowed
into one of these facilities and you know it's this
massive warehouse and the outskirts of Sheffield sort of on
a business park, and half of it is basically a
fulfillment center for Octopus, So it's full of the sort
of the components, the heat pumps and various things that
they're shipping out to people's homes. And half of it
is a training facility and one of the things it
includes is the sort of house within a warehouse which
(15:17):
is kind of set up with plumbing and everything so
that the apprentices can practice things like installing radiators. And
they also do training at heights to help with water
tanks in lofts and solar panels and things like that.
So yeah, we went in and I sat in on
a session for a while which was all about learning
how to install radiators. I really wish I had retained
more of that information might be useful to me in
(15:38):
my life. And yeah, and then we got to meet
the apprentices, which was really interesting. You know, I think
there's a big age range, definitely more men than women,
which I think is really standard in this industry, although
you know, we did meet one of the female apprentices
who was really really interesting.
Speaker 3 (15:51):
She's called Gracie Reid.
Speaker 4 (15:52):
She's twenty and she kind of comes from a family
of people who are really well versed in the heating industry.
So She's got a grandfather who was a gas engine
for example, and you know, always knew that she wanted
a trade, and I think it's really interesting that she's
kind of taking that forward. You know, this is this
is the modern version of what her grandfather did. So
that was a really lovely appealing narrative that I really liked.
(16:13):
And she was also great, you know, she has ambitions
to become a trainer in the future, and she's got
a really kind of good plan for her life. And
then some of the other people that we met, I mean,
she was just starting off in her working life, but
some of the other people we met were career changes,
so people who had had a whole other careers, you know,
sometimes for twenty years or more and other sectors before
they sort of came to this, you know, and their
(16:34):
motivations for coming to the sector were also really interesting. So,
you know, we talked to one guy, Paul Phillips, who
he used to work in a prison. He was kind
of doing physical education in a prison, and he was
an environmentalist. You know, he said, I'm just really interested
in climate change and doing my bit. And he had
tattoo of a tree, and you know, it was really
into green stuff, and I thought that was fascinating because
(16:55):
you know, the narrative you often hear is that people
don't care about these things, and clearly some people do.
Was another gentleman we met called Ed who used to
be in the army and he had had, you know,
a long, long career, lots of tours of some of
the most dangerous war zones in the last twenty five years,
and had come away sort of looking for something else,
potentially a new sense of identity.
Speaker 2 (17:15):
You know.
Speaker 4 (17:15):
He said to me, some people really struggle with their
identity after they leave the army, and Octopus, as we
saw in the warehouse, has very strong branding, very strong identity.
Speaker 1 (17:24):
Lots of pink octopuses who are.
Speaker 4 (17:26):
Yeah, and he was wearing a little sweatshirt with a
pink octopus on. There you go, that's your new identity,
and you also get to be part of this green
energy workforce. I think that's actually very empowering and exciting
for people to be part of this new vanguard of
something different.
Speaker 1 (17:45):
We'll be back with more of my conversation with Olivia
Rudguard after the shortbreak, and Hey, if you're enjoying this episode,
please rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Your feedback really matters and helps other listeners find the show.
Thank you. Octopus told us that by twenty thirty they
(18:12):
want four thousand installers will be trained up to put
solar panels and heat pumps and electric vehicle chargers. But
the cohort that we saw was about a dozen people
and it was the third cohort they were training, which
means they've only had about thirty six people who are
currently in the process. How are they going to reach
(18:33):
four thousand people in the next five years.
Speaker 3 (18:36):
Yeah, I mean, I think it's going to be a challenge.
Speaker 4 (18:37):
I mean, I will say, given that Octopus has sort
of come from nowhere to become Britain's largest utility in
the last few years, if anyone can do it, they've
definitely can found that expectations and other areas of their business.
Speaker 1 (18:49):
I got to go to Era heat Pumps, which is
another brand of heat pumps that do everything vertically integrated,
so they have their own line of heat pumps. They
also to train their own staff in Europe, and they've
trained over the past year or some three hundred people.
So you are getting into some of the hundreds when
it comes to training. But given how far behind the
(19:11):
UK is on heat pump installation, what is the UK
government doing?
Speaker 4 (19:15):
I think the first thing to say is probably that
there's not enough going on. I think there's been a
lot of policy to encourage people to install heat pumps
on the consumer side, but possibly less on the installer side,
to make sure that the industry is sort of healthy
and large enough and well developed enough to meet this demand.
And I think that's feeding into sometimes a lack of
consumer confidence as well, because people don't have easy and
(19:38):
understandable access to a good heat pump installer always they
don't know where to go. You know, there are some
really big targets out there for how many heat pumps
that you can actually needs to decarbonize home heating, which
is a really big part of meeting that zero. So
it's you know, six hundred thousand installations a year. We're
at a tiny fraction of that right now, so the
scale that the industry.
Speaker 3 (19:57):
Is at is way way way off.
Speaker 4 (20:00):
There are a couple of programs that have been announced
recently from the government side to encourage more people into
this industry, but they've got a pretty tough.
Speaker 3 (20:08):
Challenge on their hands, I think.
Speaker 4 (20:10):
I think partly because this is also an aging industry.
A lot of plumbers raging out of it, and a
lot of people are at the age where maybe they
don't want to learn, you know, in your whole new
setup or installation process, and they'll just retire still installing
gas boilers. So there are a lot of structural issues
that make this really difficult.
Speaker 1 (20:27):
Yeah, this is something I found in the Transformer story
as well. When I've went to visit the g Vernova
factory in Stafford, which is expanding. There are workforce by
fifty percent. They said, look, hiring people on the factory
floor was fine, but really engineers is a hard problem
because many of the engineers have been over the past
(20:50):
twenty years going into the tech industry because it's the
cool place, but outside by as well, and now with
the energy transition, they're trying to make the industry sexy
again to try and bring in all these engineers, and
perhaps you unmasch their salaries because they have no option
available to them. So in the hierarchy of solutions, there's
fixed immigration. If you can. If you can't, well then
(21:11):
start poaching people from other industries. If you can afford to.
And if you can't do that, then you start training
people of all ages, from young people to perhaps people
who are older and want to come into this industry.
What other solutions that will we find?
Speaker 4 (21:25):
Yeah, so I think that a similar issue of perception
or understanding is a problem here. And actually some of
the people we talk to did talk about the fact
that people have been encouraged into maybe more white collar jobs,
and there's been a lot of people going to university.
The sort of prestige associated with a manual job or
a sort of physical job manufacturing job is not as high,
(21:47):
I think, and it's sort of culturally and in society,
and you know, some of the companies we talk to
they are trying to sort of make little tweaks to
try and change that. For example, UK Bick they kind
of identified that there's a perception that engineering is dirty
and you know, involves a lot of oil and.
Speaker 3 (22:04):
Mess and dirty hands.
Speaker 4 (22:05):
But actually, you know, in battery world, a lot of
this work goes on in you know, what they call
clean rooms, which are often cleaner than operating theaters, so
you know, about as clean as it gets. So that's
something that they're sort of trying to emphasize.
Speaker 1 (22:18):
And then the Stafford case, they said when they had
job titles which had the word heavy in it, because transformers,
at least the ones that they make in Stafford are
really heavy, but it's not like the engineer has to
lift it. Their machines to lift it. But the word
heavy itself was enough to discourage women from applying to
(22:38):
those jobs. And so one tweak they found that works
for them is to actually remove the word heavy, and
more women ended up applying for those roles.
Speaker 4 (22:47):
Yeah, and I think, you know, that's another potentially relatively
untapped group of people.
Speaker 3 (22:52):
We talked earlier about.
Speaker 4 (22:53):
The Octopus visit and how you know that was there
was majority men on that course, and that's really not
atypical for the industry. I think the fact that they
have as many women as they have, they actually said,
was a point of pride, even though.
Speaker 3 (23:04):
It's still a minority.
Speaker 4 (23:05):
And so yeah, I mean, one person whose stories stuck
with me as Samanth bet We talked to her through
one of the utility companies, one of the UK utility
companies that she works for, and you know, she was
a hairdresser. That was her first career out of university,
but she did have that technical background. She'd done computer
science at university but found she didn't really get on
with it. But she was really keen to do something
(23:25):
that was a bit more meaningful, and she felt was
her opportunity to kind of contribute and put something back
for society, and so she kind of grafted her way
back into the tech industry basically and learned on the job,
and now she's a software engineer at Ovo, which is
an energy company in the UK. And I think one
of the things that she said was that actually her
(23:47):
skills as a hairdresser, those soft skills that I think
are sometimes undervalued in society, being able to talk to people,
being able to understand people, are really valuable in that
world as well, because a lot of it is talking
to value engineers, where it's talking to customers, and if
you're really good at that, that makes you really valuable
as an employee and potentially, you know, in the future,
as a manager as well. So there's much more that's
(24:08):
transferable than maybe people realize.
Speaker 1 (24:11):
So typically in our job, we do all this reporting.
We'll sit down, we'll collect all our thoughts, collect all
the reporting, find a way to write the draft so
that it reads like a good story, send it off
to editors and hope and pray that it is worthy
of publishing. Well, this one was deemed to be worthy
of publishing, but before it got published, we did get
(24:33):
a question asked by Aaron Rutkoff, our editor, who said,
this is a really good set of examples, really nice,
interesting characters. But don't you think it's a little bit
milk toast? He said, which is, all the solutions that
companies are deploying are small solutions. They are not really
solving the core of the problem, which seems to be
(24:53):
pretty severe. We have people who said, shortage of people
for this industry is an existing problem. Do you think
these solutions are actually adding up.
Speaker 4 (25:04):
I don't think they're adding up to something that solves
the problem. And I think you hear that level of
urgency when you talk to the people in this industry.
And to sort of go back to the battery example,
there are some really ambitious plans to bring battery manufacturing
to the UK and it's really central. There's a whole
industry of car manufacturing that is, you know, one of
the UK's most significant industrial outputs. Thousands and thousands of
(25:28):
jobs that sits on top of that. So you know,
there's a lot riding on the success of these plants,
and they have quite short that We're only talking about
five years or so in terms of the deadlines for
these things. So they're really trying to do something quite significant,
really rapidly, with not very much at all. And you know,
talking to Colin Heron, who is the professor at Newcastle University,
he's really involved in these efforts to make sure these
(25:49):
really ambitious big battery manufacturing projects that are sort of
supposed to bring battery manufacturing to the UK have enough
staff and have the right kind of staff and enough
skilled staff.
Speaker 3 (25:59):
He kind of said, well, we have to do it.
We don't have a choice.
Speaker 2 (26:01):
You know.
Speaker 4 (26:02):
I said, what happens if it doesn't work? And he said, no,
that's not a possibility. It has to work. I really
admired that determination, but the time deadlines are super short,
and I'm not sure that there has been enough emphasis
on this side of the equation, the people side of
the equation.
Speaker 1 (26:17):
So we talked about how this is a problem for
Western economies, but it's not quite the same problem for
countries like India and China.
Speaker 4 (26:25):
Why I think one thing that was quite interesting in
China that we found they've actually, to some extent got
the opposite situation where they're getting a lot more applicants
for the jobs that they have than they have vacancies. So,
you know, there's been a lot of layoffs in the
tech industry recently, so there's a lot of young engineers
who are looking for work, and those jobs are often
(26:45):
sort of transferable across both sectors. For example, State Grid Corp,
which distributes power across most of the country, had over
four hundred thousand applicants or its jobs during twenty twenty
four and it ended up with about twenty six thousand highs.
So you know, that's huge amount of demand for jobs
and applicants coming forward, which is really not something that
(27:06):
you would see for the same jobs in the UK.
Speaker 1 (27:09):
Yeah, in India where I grew up, students are encouraged
to get engineering or doctorate degrees as early as possible,
and so the number of engineers isn't a problem. But
we did talk to an Indian utility in the state
of Gujarat who said that while there isn't a shortage
of engineers, there is a shortage of skills that they
have because the training isn't good enough or the education
(27:31):
isn't good enough for them to take on the roles,
and so often they are spending forty five days training
after their degree to start to do the work on
the ground.
Speaker 4 (27:41):
Yeah, and I think you kind of see the cultural
difference there when you compare it to the US or Europe.
You know, I think that there's not been the same
emphasis on people gaining technical skills or going into technical careers.
University education has become something that funnels people potentially into
other industries, maybe white collaring industries, banking, law, journalism, And
(28:03):
now those countries are sort of waking up a bit,
I think and realizing that the consequence of that is
that they are now reliant on technical processes that are
happening in other countries on the other side of the world,
and they don't control that. You know, I think countries
are sort of waking up and realizing that actually, if
they don't have the skills among their own population to
(28:24):
create these products and carry out these processes that are
really critical to the energy transition, they are then reliant
on trade. They're reliant on trading partners, they're reliant largely
now on China. And you know that looks I think
like a fairly precarious place to be with the world
looking as it is, so it's there's a real urgency
to solving that problem.
Speaker 3 (28:46):
I think.
Speaker 1 (28:46):
Well, I didn't expect to end this conversation by you
making me feel like a trader is somebody who trained
as an engineer now working as a journalist and wasting
away my skills, not helping the UK become a trading
giant that it could be. But this was certainly a
really fun story to report it. It was months of work,
but I feel like a really good addition to the
(29:08):
unusual bottlenecks stopping electrification from happening as fast as it can.
Thank you, Olivia, thank you very much, and thank you
for listening to zero. This is the second episode in
the Bottleneck series. For the third, we'll be looking at
the shortage of undersea cables. And now for the sound
of the week. Sitting next to a heatpum that's running
(29:31):
to say you can hear loud?
Speaker 4 (29:32):
They are can you hear it?
Speaker 1 (29:39):
Well? That is the sound of a heat pump, something
some people say can be pretty loud, but turns out
doesn't have to be. If you like this episode, please
take a moment to rate and review the show on
Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Share this episode with a friend
or with an engineer you know. This episode was produced
by Oscar Boyd. Bloomberg's head of podcast is Said Bauman
(30:00):
and head of Talk is Brendan newnham Art. The music
is composed by Wonderly Special. Thanks to Jessica bec Soamersadi
Moses Andim and Shawan Wegner. Thanks also to all the
reporters and editors from Bloomberg News who contributed to this
featured story. Julia Janiki Eva, Brendel Lou del Bello, Francuas
de Popoi, Dan Murta, Somnad Bad, Jody Mexin, Emily Busso,
(30:24):
and Aaron dutkoff I am Akshad Rati bak Soon
Welcome to Zero. I am Aksha Drati This week, where
are all the people? Last year I spoke to Keith Anderson,
CEO of Scottish Barer for an episode of Zero, and
(00:23):
there was a throwaway line in that long conversation that
has stuck with me. It was about people.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
Right now, I'm looking to employ another thousand engineers. My
counterparts at SASE are looking to employ another thousand engineers,
and my counterparts on National Grid are looking to employ
another thousand engineers. We're all looking for about two and
a half thousand engineers that are not two and a
half thousand unemployed engineers in central Scotland. So if we
(00:49):
don't do anything differently, we'll just run around stealing staff
from each other.
Speaker 1 (00:55):
The people challenge for any growing industry is a known problem,
but the Heat's answer made me look deeper for why
that shortage of skilled workers for electrification industries is a
more severe challenge than most people think, and it was
not hard to find examples in almost every large economy
in the world except you guessed it, China. This week's
(01:18):
episode is going to explore the second story in the
Bottleneck series for Bloomberg Green, where we look at unusual
things that are holding back electrification and to help me
bring out the best of the reporting. I'm joined by
my London colleague, Olivia Rudgar. This will be the second
episode in the Bottleneck series. If you haven't listened to
the first one, please check out last week's episode on
(01:39):
the shortage of transformers and why we are running the
Bottleneck series in the first place. Welcome back to the show, Olivia,
Thank you so much. So you write about many things
for green By. One of your focus areas is greener
living and that means writing about things like heat pumps.
How did all of that bring you to the subject
(02:01):
of our chat today, which is a shortage of skilled workers.
Speaker 3 (02:05):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (02:05):
So I spent quite a lot of time thinking about
the heat pump market and how installations are going.
Speaker 3 (02:09):
And the short answer to that.
Speaker 4 (02:10):
Is not very quickly, especially in the UK, and the
reasons for that, and some of them with structural their
cost based, but a lot of it is because there's
just not a very mature industry for heat pump installers
in the UK. There are not enough people who know
how to do a really good heat pump install and
I thought it would be quite interesting to try and look
at that, and especially in the context of what's happening now,
which is you get big companies coming in to try
(02:32):
and be heat pump installers and where are they finding
the people to do that.
Speaker 1 (02:35):
We heard in the intro the CEO of Scottish Power
talk about a shortage of people working in the utilities.
So typically in a newsroom, when two reporters who are
working on two different things come across a trend that
seems to be affecting a big industry, it's time to
look more deeply. And that's what we've done with this
story with our colleague Jost Soul in New York. We
(02:58):
interview dozens of people for this and one of those
interviews really stuck out. Bathsudmeyer, who's the managing director at
Boston Consulting Group and head of its climate and sustainability practice,
said this thing. He said, the north Volt fiasco is
a classic example of a great idea in concept, but
it fails over the availability of labor. And for context,
(03:19):
Northwold is a Swedish company aiming to be Europe's first
battery giant. And I say aiming to be it's because well,
it filed for bankruptcy in March twenty twenty five. So Olivia,
what happened and why is a shortage of workers involved here?
Speaker 3 (03:36):
Yeah?
Speaker 4 (03:36):
So, I mean this is one of those stories where
I had to really rethink what I understood about what
happened with Northvale. They were for a while a big
European success story. This was sort of Europe's effort to
be a global power on the battery stage.
Speaker 3 (03:51):
They were on the verge of doing an IPO.
Speaker 4 (03:52):
They announced that they were going to do one of
twenty twenty three, and then it all fell apart.
Speaker 3 (03:56):
And I think what we found was, you know, they
just didn't have the.
Speaker 4 (03:59):
Pace people that knew how to run the really sophisticated
machinery that they were using for the manufacturing, and those
people tended to come from China and South Korea and
they just couldn't get them. And the domestic population in
Europe where they were operating just wasn't sufficient. They just
couldn't get the expertise and production sload to the extent
that they weren't making any money.
Speaker 3 (04:19):
And that was the issue.
Speaker 1 (04:21):
Yeah. I mean, the company raised thirteen billion dollars in total,
and if it had iPod when they were hoping to IPO,
which is in twenty twenty three, the valuation could have
been twenty billion dollars and so suddenly that company has
gone to well, not zero, because there will be something
that people can recover from it, but it doesn't exist
as a company that had all this ambition. It is
(04:43):
quite an extreme example of what a shortage of workers
can do. It can lead to a company failing. But
shortages of skilled workers in itself is not a new thing.
Often in booming industries there is just a difficulty of
finding people because sometimes the skills are just new and
you need to find the people with those skills or
(05:04):
train them. These days, automation can help sometimes do smooth
things over, but eventually you just need people for those jobs.
What we found in the electrification industries is that people
are particularly alarmed with this problem. Why is that.
Speaker 4 (05:20):
I think the alarm comes from, you know, some deadlines
that you have on that industry that you possibly don't
in other industries. Part of that is meeting climate goals.
You know, these are in some cases sort of technologies
that are scaling up really rapidly and in the last
few years in the West, so you know in Europe
and the US, there's been a sudden sort of influx
of investment or a sudden influx of interest, and that's
(05:42):
really rising quite recently, and you see that in the
heat pup market, and obviously that was the case with Norfall,
and that's kind of coupled with some more sort of
underlying demographic and historic trends that have made that increase
sort of difficult service. So, you know, there's very well
known to be an aging population worker age population is
not where I think most companies in any sector would.
Speaker 3 (06:03):
Like it to be for the availability of labor.
Speaker 4 (06:06):
And then coupled with that, you know, especially in the
UK where we sit now, there's a long history of
the industrialization. You know, the UK is an industrial power
and it certainly isn't anymore. So we've shared a lot
of the resource that we once had in that space.
Speaker 1 (06:18):
And in our reporting we found that shortage of skilled
workers is not quite a global problem. Places like India
and China, where there is a large population and where
they have seen electricity demand rise five or ten percent
per year, those are places that typically don't face a
shortage of workers. In the case of China, in fact,
we found that they just have many more than they
(06:41):
need to do their jobs. It's really a shortage of
workers in Western economies. Now, before we get to solutions,
let's try and understand what is the impact this can
have on companies. So, in the case of heat pumps,
business can slow down. In the case of Northworld, a
company can fail. What other impacts are there?
Speaker 4 (07:04):
Yeah, I mean, it obviously increases the cost. If there's
not enough labor, the cost of hiring goes up. You
have to pay your workers more.
Speaker 3 (07:11):
So. One example that Josh our colleague in the US,
came up with.
Speaker 4 (07:15):
He found and that Dominion Energy, which is a utility
in Virginia, asked regulators to increase bills for residential customers
by about ten dollars fifty per month over the next
two years, which is partly because of that high cost
of labor.
Speaker 3 (07:27):
So it's being passed on to the consumer as well.
Speaker 4 (07:30):
And you know, in the sector that I'm most familiar
with that out of all of these, which is the
heat pump sector, what we found was that for Octopus certainly,
which is one of the biggest players in this market,
the strangle on their ambitions to sort of dominate and
grow it's not, you know, a lack of consumer demand.
It's not a lack of components or sort of physical items,
it's that lack of labor. So, you know, we had
(07:51):
one executive tell us, it's not that we don't have
the technology or the hardware or solutions. It's just how
quickly we can physically get people brought into the business
and trained up. And the ultimate impact of that is
that they are limited in terms of the number of
heat pumps they can instore for people.
Speaker 1 (08:05):
So one idea to try and deal with the shortage
of people is of course to import them. Now, the
politics of immigration is complicated, but companies who want more
people want them quickly. Are they calling on governments to
make it easier to bring people from places like Indian
China where these skills are in abundance.
Speaker 4 (08:25):
Yeah, So it wasn't really something that came up in
our conversations when we talk to people that we didn't
have lots of companies saying, oh, yes, please, we would
like more liberal immigration laws, even when we were asking
them what would help you. I think it's interesting if
you look at the sort of current political climate, it's
quite difficult maybe for companies to explicitly ask for that,
and it's very sort of politically contentious. So, you know,
(08:45):
I talked to Julia Jlatt, who's the associate director at
the Migration Policy Institute, and she just said companies are
not talking about immigration policy. They are running away from
the topic. And I think that holds true across both
the US and Europe at the moment.
Speaker 1 (08:58):
And immigrants have met to this industry. One of those
reports from Julia's institute found that eight percent of renewable
energy workers in Spain are immigrants, twenty six percent in Australia,
So the numbers can be quite large depending on when
the world these industries are growing. Coming to the politics
(09:19):
of immigration, you and I sit in a country that
chose to Brexit, which means leave the EU as a
result of wanting to have fewer immigrants. Now we are
a few years on from when Brexit happened. How did
that play out for the UK?
Speaker 4 (09:34):
Yeah, so the picture with immigration and brexit's quite interesting
because you know, one of the things you did here
around the time that it was being campaigned for by
supporters of Brexit were actually, you know, this would open
the UK up to bring in more skilled immigrants. From
places outside the EU, so you know, India would have
been one of those places. And the fact of the
matter now is that not only has immigration gone up
(09:55):
quite significantly since then, so it hasn't come down in
the way that you know, some supporters would have wanted.
You don't here really hear many people making that argument
now that we should have lots more immigrants from India,
so that I think that's an interesting indication of where
that picture has gone. The kind of underlying context of
this is, like we said before, you know, the UK
is not an industrial power anymore. Less than ten percent
(10:16):
of the UK's economic output comes from manufacturing.
Speaker 3 (10:20):
There's been a big increase in immigration.
Speaker 4 (10:22):
In the last few years, which has been really politically controversial.
Paul after poll suggests it's something that people are really
concerned about, and that sort of political context is now
forcing the left leaning Labor Party to look at some
quite restrictive immigration policies and just recently actually, so I
think that we're in a situation now where it's I
(10:42):
can see why it's difficult for companies to say things
that would be pro more migration.
Speaker 1 (10:47):
Yeah, I mean, the nuance of Brexit perhaps is lost
on people outside because from Brexit there was actually a
shortage of workers in the UK, and that caused the
Conservative Party, which was eating exit, to actually loosen the
criteria for legal migration, and which is what led to
(11:07):
a huge number of people coming in trying to solve
the problems that the country had. And now there's a
backlash where even the left leaning party, which is typically
thought of as being more pro immigration, has had to
take stances that are seemingly like of f our right party.
And so if immigration may not be a viable solution
in the short term, there is one thing that companies
(11:29):
could be doing, which is approaching people from other sectors.
Is that happening, Yeah.
Speaker 4 (11:35):
I mean that was one of the things that I
think was most interesting in this reporting, the similarities actually
between some of the processes in these really technical sectors
and some of the more established traditional areas of manufacturing.
So you know, for example, we talked to uk Bic,
which is a facility that helps battery companies develop and
(11:55):
industrialize their processes, and they've hired people quite a few
people from say industries like baking, so people who are
making pastry are now making batteries, and there's a lot
of crossover there, so you know, that's something that they've
they've had to think outside the box and be a
little bit innovative.
Speaker 1 (12:10):
When I heard that, I was actually not surprised. As
a chemical engineer, I kind of know this. In batteries,
you actually have stuff that is quite dough like, quite
flower like, and so you know, machines handle dough and
flower and so machines can handle battery chemicals. But yes,
it is something that people find surprising, which is that
(12:31):
these transferable skills from other industries that could be applied
to what you know, would have been seen as a
high tech manufacturing versus croissot making.
Speaker 4 (12:40):
Yeah, and I you know, I think even with the
UK PIC people that we spoke to, there is still
a learning process. So it takes, you know, many months
to get people up to the level where they can
be let loose, I suppose on the factory floor. And
if you think about that's where people already have a
level of comfort and understanding of what it's like to
be an industrial facility. Training somebody from scratch is a
(13:01):
whole different ballgame. So you know, we also talk to
a professor at Newcastle University who's really involved in the
process of staffing some of these battery facilities that are
coming to the UK that you know, within the next
few years, really really tight deadlines, you know. And he
was making the point that in southwest of England, which
is one area where these one of these facilities are
supposed to be, it's a very agricultural area, you know,
that's what the history is, that's what the people's background
(13:24):
and their understanding and their maybe their job experiences, and
going from that to working in a battery facility is
a much bigger jump.
Speaker 1 (13:31):
And so training came up as one of those things
which companies deploy to try and deal with these solutions.
What does this training look like on the ground.
Speaker 4 (13:41):
Yeah, so when we talk about training, it can mean
a whole range of different things. You can be starting
with people who have a little bit of experience in
an industry or none at all, and obviously that then
changes the level of teaching you have to do. But
you know, you can take this right back to the
school level. So you know, it's arguable that there's potentially
not enough focus on those technical skills that are being
taught in schools. So, for example, the French power company
(14:01):
enodis is doing technology classes in high schools and also
in universities, and then they kind of offer internships off
the back of that, so they know that those people
who've done those training programs have a really good basis
in the skills that they need. And then you know,
one of the other things that we found was there's
quite a lot of career changing in this industry, so
people coming into it a lot later on, maybe with
(14:23):
soft skills or other skills that are then helpful and
relevant to them in that more technical career, but not
potentially with the technical background, which is what they then need.
Speaker 3 (14:30):
To be taught.
Speaker 1 (14:31):
And to try and just get a sense of what
this training looks like, Octopus Energy opened their doors to us.
We got to go to Sheffield and North of England
and actually look at what a training center looks like.
What does training on a day look like for people
who are coming into this industry. From the day we
(14:51):
spent in Sheffield, what did you find surprising?
Speaker 4 (14:54):
Well, it was really interesting to be sort of allowed
into one of these facilities and you know it's this
massive warehouse and the outskirts of Sheffield sort of on
a business park, and half of it is basically a
fulfillment center for Octopus, So it's full of the sort
of the components, the heat pumps and various things that
they're shipping out to people's homes. And half of it
is a training facility and one of the things it
includes is the sort of house within a warehouse which
(15:17):
is kind of set up with plumbing and everything so
that the apprentices can practice things like installing radiators. And
they also do training at heights to help with water
tanks in lofts and solar panels and things like that.
So yeah, we went in and I sat in on
a session for a while which was all about learning
how to install radiators. I really wish I had retained
more of that information might be useful to me in
(15:38):
my life. And yeah, and then we got to meet
the apprentices, which was really interesting. You know, I think
there's a big age range, definitely more men than women,
which I think is really standard in this industry, although
you know, we did meet one of the female apprentices
who was really really interesting.
Speaker 3 (15:51):
She's called Gracie Reid.
Speaker 4 (15:52):
She's twenty and she kind of comes from a family
of people who are really well versed in the heating industry.
So She's got a grandfather who was a gas engine
for example, and you know, always knew that she wanted
a trade, and I think it's really interesting that she's
kind of taking that forward. You know, this is this
is the modern version of what her grandfather did. So
that was a really lovely appealing narrative that I really liked.
(16:13):
And she was also great, you know, she has ambitions
to become a trainer in the future, and she's got
a really kind of good plan for her life. And
then some of the other people that we met, I mean,
she was just starting off in her working life, but
some of the other people we met were career changes,
so people who had had a whole other careers, you know,
sometimes for twenty years or more and other sectors before
they sort of came to this, you know, and their
(16:34):
motivations for coming to the sector were also really interesting. So,
you know, we talked to one guy, Paul Phillips, who
he used to work in a prison. He was kind
of doing physical education in a prison, and he was
an environmentalist. You know, he said, I'm just really interested
in climate change and doing my bit. And he had
tattoo of a tree, and you know, it was really
into green stuff, and I thought that was fascinating because
(16:55):
you know, the narrative you often hear is that people
don't care about these things, and clearly some people do.
Was another gentleman we met called Ed who used to
be in the army and he had had, you know,
a long, long career, lots of tours of some of
the most dangerous war zones in the last twenty five years,
and had come away sort of looking for something else,
potentially a new sense of identity.
Speaker 2 (17:15):
You know.
Speaker 4 (17:15):
He said to me, some people really struggle with their
identity after they leave the army, and Octopus, as we
saw in the warehouse, has very strong branding, very strong identity.
Speaker 1 (17:24):
Lots of pink octopuses who are.
Speaker 4 (17:26):
Yeah, and he was wearing a little sweatshirt with a
pink octopus on. There you go, that's your new identity,
and you also get to be part of this green
energy workforce. I think that's actually very empowering and exciting
for people to be part of this new vanguard of
something different.
Speaker 1 (17:45):
We'll be back with more of my conversation with Olivia
Rudguard after the shortbreak, and Hey, if you're enjoying this episode,
please rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Your feedback really matters and helps other listeners find the show.
Thank you. Octopus told us that by twenty thirty they
(18:12):
want four thousand installers will be trained up to put
solar panels and heat pumps and electric vehicle chargers. But
the cohort that we saw was about a dozen people
and it was the third cohort they were training, which
means they've only had about thirty six people who are
currently in the process. How are they going to reach
(18:33):
four thousand people in the next five years.
Speaker 3 (18:36):
Yeah, I mean, I think it's going to be a challenge.
Speaker 4 (18:37):
I mean, I will say, given that Octopus has sort
of come from nowhere to become Britain's largest utility in
the last few years, if anyone can do it, they've
definitely can found that expectations and other areas of their business.
Speaker 1 (18:49):
I got to go to Era heat Pumps, which is
another brand of heat pumps that do everything vertically integrated,
so they have their own line of heat pumps. They
also to train their own staff in Europe, and they've
trained over the past year or some three hundred people.
So you are getting into some of the hundreds when
it comes to training. But given how far behind the
(19:11):
UK is on heat pump installation, what is the UK
government doing?
Speaker 4 (19:15):
I think the first thing to say is probably that
there's not enough going on. I think there's been a
lot of policy to encourage people to install heat pumps
on the consumer side, but possibly less on the installer side,
to make sure that the industry is sort of healthy
and large enough and well developed enough to meet this demand.
And I think that's feeding into sometimes a lack of
consumer confidence as well, because people don't have easy and
(19:38):
understandable access to a good heat pump installer always they
don't know where to go. You know, there are some
really big targets out there for how many heat pumps
that you can actually needs to decarbonize home heating, which
is a really big part of meeting that zero. So
it's you know, six hundred thousand installations a year. We're
at a tiny fraction of that right now, so the
scale that the industry.
Speaker 3 (19:57):
Is at is way way way off.
Speaker 4 (20:00):
There are a couple of programs that have been announced
recently from the government side to encourage more people into
this industry, but they've got a pretty tough.
Speaker 3 (20:08):
Challenge on their hands, I think.
Speaker 4 (20:10):
I think partly because this is also an aging industry.
A lot of plumbers raging out of it, and a
lot of people are at the age where maybe they
don't want to learn, you know, in your whole new
setup or installation process, and they'll just retire still installing
gas boilers. So there are a lot of structural issues
that make this really difficult.
Speaker 1 (20:27):
Yeah, this is something I found in the Transformer story
as well. When I've went to visit the g Vernova
factory in Stafford, which is expanding. There are workforce by
fifty percent. They said, look, hiring people on the factory
floor was fine, but really engineers is a hard problem
because many of the engineers have been over the past
(20:50):
twenty years going into the tech industry because it's the
cool place, but outside by as well, and now with
the energy transition, they're trying to make the industry sexy
again to try and bring in all these engineers, and
perhaps you unmasch their salaries because they have no option
available to them. So in the hierarchy of solutions, there's
fixed immigration. If you can. If you can't, well then
(21:11):
start poaching people from other industries. If you can afford to.
And if you can't do that, then you start training
people of all ages, from young people to perhaps people
who are older and want to come into this industry.
What other solutions that will we find?
Speaker 4 (21:25):
Yeah, so I think that a similar issue of perception
or understanding is a problem here. And actually some of
the people we talk to did talk about the fact
that people have been encouraged into maybe more white collar jobs,
and there's been a lot of people going to university.
The sort of prestige associated with a manual job or
a sort of physical job manufacturing job is not as high,
(21:47):
I think, and it's sort of culturally and in society,
and you know, some of the companies we talk to
they are trying to sort of make little tweaks to
try and change that. For example, UK Bick they kind
of identified that there's a perception that engineering is dirty
and you know, involves a lot of oil and.
Speaker 3 (22:04):
Mess and dirty hands.
Speaker 4 (22:05):
But actually, you know, in battery world, a lot of
this work goes on in you know, what they call
clean rooms, which are often cleaner than operating theaters, so
you know, about as clean as it gets. So that's
something that they're sort of trying to emphasize.
Speaker 1 (22:18):
And then the Stafford case, they said when they had
job titles which had the word heavy in it, because transformers,
at least the ones that they make in Stafford are
really heavy, but it's not like the engineer has to
lift it. Their machines to lift it. But the word
heavy itself was enough to discourage women from applying to
(22:38):
those jobs. And so one tweak they found that works
for them is to actually remove the word heavy, and
more women ended up applying for those roles.
Speaker 4 (22:47):
Yeah, and I think, you know, that's another potentially relatively
untapped group of people.
Speaker 3 (22:52):
We talked earlier about.
Speaker 4 (22:53):
The Octopus visit and how you know that was there
was majority men on that course, and that's really not
atypical for the industry. I think the fact that they
have as many women as they have, they actually said,
was a point of pride, even though.
Speaker 3 (23:04):
It's still a minority.
Speaker 4 (23:05):
And so yeah, I mean, one person whose stories stuck
with me as Samanth bet We talked to her through
one of the utility companies, one of the UK utility
companies that she works for, and you know, she was
a hairdresser. That was her first career out of university,
but she did have that technical background. She'd done computer
science at university but found she didn't really get on
with it. But she was really keen to do something
(23:25):
that was a bit more meaningful, and she felt was
her opportunity to kind of contribute and put something back
for society, and so she kind of grafted her way
back into the tech industry basically and learned on the job,
and now she's a software engineer at Ovo, which is
an energy company in the UK. And I think one
of the things that she said was that actually her
(23:47):
skills as a hairdresser, those soft skills that I think
are sometimes undervalued in society, being able to talk to people,
being able to understand people, are really valuable in that
world as well, because a lot of it is talking
to value engineers, where it's talking to customers, and if
you're really good at that, that makes you really valuable
as an employee and potentially, you know, in the future,
as a manager as well. So there's much more that's
(24:08):
transferable than maybe people realize.
Speaker 1 (24:11):
So typically in our job, we do all this reporting.
We'll sit down, we'll collect all our thoughts, collect all
the reporting, find a way to write the draft so
that it reads like a good story, send it off
to editors and hope and pray that it is worthy
of publishing. Well, this one was deemed to be worthy
of publishing, but before it got published, we did get
(24:33):
a question asked by Aaron Rutkoff, our editor, who said,
this is a really good set of examples, really nice,
interesting characters. But don't you think it's a little bit
milk toast? He said, which is, all the solutions that
companies are deploying are small solutions. They are not really
solving the core of the problem, which seems to be
(24:53):
pretty severe. We have people who said, shortage of people
for this industry is an existing problem. Do you think
these solutions are actually adding up.
Speaker 4 (25:04):
I don't think they're adding up to something that solves
the problem. And I think you hear that level of
urgency when you talk to the people in this industry.
And to sort of go back to the battery example,
there are some really ambitious plans to bring battery manufacturing
to the UK and it's really central. There's a whole
industry of car manufacturing that is, you know, one of
the UK's most significant industrial outputs. Thousands and thousands of
(25:28):
jobs that sits on top of that. So you know,
there's a lot riding on the success of these plants,
and they have quite short that We're only talking about
five years or so in terms of the deadlines for
these things. So they're really trying to do something quite significant,
really rapidly, with not very much at all. And you know,
talking to Colin Heron, who is the professor at Newcastle University,
he's really involved in these efforts to make sure these
(25:49):
really ambitious big battery manufacturing projects that are sort of
supposed to bring battery manufacturing to the UK have enough
staff and have the right kind of staff and enough
skilled staff.
Speaker 3 (25:59):
He kind of said, well, we have to do it.
We don't have a choice.
Speaker 2 (26:01):
You know.
Speaker 4 (26:02):
I said, what happens if it doesn't work? And he said, no,
that's not a possibility. It has to work. I really
admired that determination, but the time deadlines are super short,
and I'm not sure that there has been enough emphasis
on this side of the equation, the people side of
the equation.
Speaker 1 (26:17):
So we talked about how this is a problem for
Western economies, but it's not quite the same problem for
countries like India and China.
Speaker 4 (26:25):
Why I think one thing that was quite interesting in
China that we found they've actually, to some extent got
the opposite situation where they're getting a lot more applicants
for the jobs that they have than they have vacancies. So,
you know, there's been a lot of layoffs in the
tech industry recently, so there's a lot of young engineers
who are looking for work, and those jobs are often
(26:45):
sort of transferable across both sectors. For example, State Grid Corp,
which distributes power across most of the country, had over
four hundred thousand applicants or its jobs during twenty twenty
four and it ended up with about twenty six thousand highs.
So you know, that's huge amount of demand for jobs
and applicants coming forward, which is really not something that
(27:06):
you would see for the same jobs in the UK.
Speaker 1 (27:09):
Yeah, in India where I grew up, students are encouraged
to get engineering or doctorate degrees as early as possible,
and so the number of engineers isn't a problem. But
we did talk to an Indian utility in the state
of Gujarat who said that while there isn't a shortage
of engineers, there is a shortage of skills that they
have because the training isn't good enough or the education
(27:31):
isn't good enough for them to take on the roles,
and so often they are spending forty five days training
after their degree to start to do the work on
the ground.
Speaker 4 (27:41):
Yeah, and I think you kind of see the cultural
difference there when you compare it to the US or Europe.
You know, I think that there's not been the same
emphasis on people gaining technical skills or going into technical careers.
University education has become something that funnels people potentially into
other industries, maybe white collaring industries, banking, law, journalism, And
(28:03):
now those countries are sort of waking up a bit,
I think and realizing that the consequence of that is
that they are now reliant on technical processes that are
happening in other countries on the other side of the world,
and they don't control that. You know, I think countries
are sort of waking up and realizing that actually, if
they don't have the skills among their own population to
(28:24):
create these products and carry out these processes that are
really critical to the energy transition, they are then reliant
on trade. They're reliant on trading partners, they're reliant largely
now on China. And you know that looks I think
like a fairly precarious place to be with the world
looking as it is, so it's there's a real urgency
to solving that problem.
Speaker 3 (28:46):
I think.
Speaker 1 (28:46):
Well, I didn't expect to end this conversation by you
making me feel like a trader is somebody who trained
as an engineer now working as a journalist and wasting
away my skills, not helping the UK become a trading
giant that it could be. But this was certainly a
really fun story to report it. It was months of work,
but I feel like a really good addition to the
(29:08):
unusual bottlenecks stopping electrification from happening as fast as it can.
Thank you, Olivia, thank you very much, and thank you
for listening to zero. This is the second episode in
the Bottleneck series. For the third, we'll be looking at
the shortage of undersea cables. And now for the sound
of the week. Sitting next to a heatpum that's running
(29:31):
to say you can hear loud?
Speaker 4 (29:32):
They are can you hear it?
Speaker 1 (29:39):
Well? That is the sound of a heat pump, something
some people say can be pretty loud, but turns out
doesn't have to be. If you like this episode, please
take a moment to rate and review the show on
Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Share this episode with a friend
or with an engineer you know. This episode was produced
by Oscar Boyd. Bloomberg's head of podcast is Said Bauman
(30:00):
and head of Talk is Brendan newnham Art. The music
is composed by Wonderly Special. Thanks to Jessica bec Soamersadi
Moses Andim and Shawan Wegner. Thanks also to all the
reporters and editors from Bloomberg News who contributed to this
featured story. Julia Janiki Eva, Brendel Lou del Bello, Francuas
de Popoi, Dan Murta, Somnad Bad, Jody Mexin, Emily Busso,
(30:24):
and Aaron dutkoff I am Akshad Rati bak Soon
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